Lady Gaga – The Edge of Glory (video)

When “The Edge of Glory” came out, I described it as like Jason Nevins remixing Kelly Clarkson; should probably have clarified that this was intended as praise, an attempt to convey the splendid excessiveness of the song. Indeed, the song has become my favorite track of the year, and the more I listen to it the more it seems to be even more overstuffed than a Jason Nevins remix. Much the same could be said of Born This Way, and while the continuing parade of terrible lyrics, ridiculous outfits, and 13-minute videos got a bit wearing, I think it’s important to maintain fidelity to the Gaga event. The ambition (and Gaga’s obsession with making sure we know about the ambition) and the failure is kind of the point; Katherine St Asaph’s description of the album as “like the patterns you can use to cast invulnerable 73-foot-tall shadows on the wall behind you with your scrawny Wizard of Oz hands” remains the best explanation of what it’s doing, at least when it works.

The Saturday's – All Fired Up (video)

Another of my favorite tracks was similarly preposterous in its size. The Saturdays’ On Your Radar is the logical endpoint of the increasing indistinction between dance and pop which has coincided with the Saturdays’ time in the charts, largely abandoning conventional pop song structures in favor of dance builds and breaks, taken to an absurd (and, when it works, as in the case of the Xenomania produced “All Fired Up,” brilliant) lengths. Two widely cited bits of musical journalism discussed something related: Daniel Barrow on songs constructed around a textural and emotional intensification, or “soar,” and Simon Reynolds on “digital maximalism.” Both articles are kind of weak, and would have benefited from more historicization of their objects; I mean, Reynolds writes about music which “is up!, preposterously euphoric but genuinely awesome” without mentioning gabba? And confining his discussion to dance music misses how widespread this kind of maximalism is, or what wider cultural trends it might be tapping in to.

Britney Spears – Till the World Ends (video)

The distinctive thing about the maximalism in the charts this year is the apocalyptic tone. You can see this to some extent in the Gaga and Saturdays videos, but the central exponent here was Britney. Appropriately, because she was already developing this trend back in 2007 with the release of Blackout. At the time, I rather underrated the album, seeing it as part of the narcotic rave&B trend that developed from FutureSex/LoveSounds, but it’s actually doing something else, not withdrawing from the world but attempting to obliterate it. The political significance of this apocalyptic maximalism is something I didn’t really focus on in my own review of Britney’s album (although it’s not incompatible – the proletariat, after all, is the class whose destiny it is to abolish its own conditions of reproduction), but The New Inquiry joined the dots between the barely-suppressed insurrectionary fervor of apocalyptic maximalism and the forms of struggle that have been emerging recently.

2NE1 – Can't Nobody (video)

This year I started paying attention to K-Pop, which seems to be an entire genre devoted to maximalism. Last.fm has been periodically playing me K-Pop tracks for a while, although the only one I can remember is Girls’ Generation’s “Gee” from 2009, which is amazing. Anyway, Girls’ Generation are great and all, but their recent tracks are a bit restrained compared to their stuff from 2009, and the last thing I want from K-Pop is restraint. But through YouTube’s knowledge of related videos, Girls’ Generation led me to 2NE1, who are if anything even better. This year they released a mini album featuring a great synth-poppy track, “Hate You,” and a slightly confusing entry in the self-esteem pop genre, “Ugly,” but their best song remains last year’s “Can’t Nobody,” which is just fantastic: the amazingly swagged out rap at the beginning, the diva-ey chorus, the screeching tire sounds,the bit in the video with Minzy wearing a suit….

On the topic of maximalism and swagger, Jay-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne was released to howls of frankly bizarre protest about its supposed excess. The worst of these was probably Ryan Briles’s at The Activist, which calls the album “upper class propaganda.” This is so fucking stupid, and is an interpretation which could only be sustained by failing to pay attention to the album itself and the last, IDK, 20 years of hip hop. Yes, Jay-Z is a petit-bourgeois black nationalist rather than a revolutionary socialist, but it’s not like he doesn’t have a worked-out theory of the relationship between material success and the liberation of poor black people, and the album continually thematizes this complicated relationship (perhaps most straightforwardly on “Murder to Excellence”). I don’t know that Watch the Throne is a great album, but it’s better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, because MBDTF was about Kanye’s individual and internalized pathologies and self-loathing, which aren’t really all that interesting subjects, while Watch the Throne expands the frame to consider the social context which produces these pathologies. I’m also still mad that that Ryan Briles post completely fails to get Kanye’s very funny joke about forcing his son to be a Republican “so everyone knows he loves white people,” from the album’s best track, “New Day.”

Lil B – Unchain Me (video)

I don’t know if rap hasn’t been very good this year, or if I’ve just lost interest, or what, but the only really good hip-hop album I can think of from this year is Lil B’s I’m Gay. It’s not entirely clear what makes this an album, as opposed to the over 9,000 mixtapes Lil B also released this year, particularly a he put the album up for free download almost as soon as it had been released, but it is both better and more coherent than the mixtapes. Lil B obviously has the most innovative flow in rap since forever, and aside from the entertainment value of his meme-generating lolcat rap, he’s working through a bunch of issues in an honest and interesting, if not always right, way.

Katy B – Broken Record (video)

Also, I guess, falling in the category of maximalism would be brostep. I’m a bit confused by the attempt to delineate brostep, perhaps because “bro” is a bit of an alien category (we don’t, quite, have bros in England). A lot of the dubstep purists’ criticism of brostep reminded me of dismissals of donk a few years back; the difference is the way the process of Bourdieuvian distinction works rather differently in the US than in the UK. In the UK, the crassness of donk was signified primarily in class terms, with donk unsophisticated because northern and working class. In the US, the racialization of class means that the distinction works differently: the crassness of brostep is signified as white and (thus also) middle class; hence the relatively priveleged fratboy brostep listener is contrasted with the faux-bohemian hipster. Which is to say, I’m not at all convinced that the category of brostep has any real coherence, beyond a general name for big, hooky, populist rave tunes. And if that’s what brostep means, the biggest brostep record of the year would be Katy B’s On a Mission, although Katy is no bro.

Last few things about which I don’t have much to say about. Cher Lloyd’s is really good (even “Swagger Jagger” is good if you can persuade yourself to not hear the “O My Darling Clementine” bits, but “Playa Boi” and “Dub on the Track” are better). Selena Gomez released a fairly consistently good album, Demi Lovato released a less consistent album which did have some pretty good tracks. Beyoncé released the best album of her career. Nicola Roberts released a very good album, Florrie and Sky Ferreira released good EPs, Menya and tAtu split up.

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These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. (The Communist Manifesto)

Britney’s Femme Fatale is excellent, and unexpectedly so. It’s produced by Dr Luke, surely one of the most overexposed producers today, but, while it certainly uses plenty of Dr Luke’s current favorite tropes, it’s different in interesting ways from, as well as being much better than, the rest of his current product. Evidence of Dr Luke’s versatility? Or of Britney’s godlike genius, her mysterious ability to bring out the best in her collaborators, even when she doesn’t appear to have any obvious input through the rockist-approved methods of songwriting or production?

Dr Luke’s ubiquity gives us plenty of other material against which to compare Femme Fatale, and so to isolate its particular genius. The two best points of comparison are Katy Perry and Ke$ha, Dr Luke’s other two flagship artists. They all share Dr Luke’s thudding, monotonous beats, but the meaning of this monotony becomes different in each case. Ke$ha deals with this by adopting a vocal style (and writing lyrics to emphasize it) that lurches drunkenly around the beat, skipping ahead of it then getting confused and dropping behind. This is why Ke$ha’s songs always have an air of desperation, a sense that partying might be an escape but is also something remorseless to be escaped from.

Katy Perry has none of this ambivalence, throwing herself with gusto into Dr Luke’s sledgehammer beats. As with Ke$ha, Perry’s songs work on a relationship between the beats and the voice, but where Ke$ha builds up a tension between the two, Perry’s voice reinforces, indeed endorses the beats (a point well made by the “official lyrics video” for “Teenage Dream”). What gives Perry the authority to give this kind of imprimatur to the beats is the organic humanity of her voice, as set against the mechanical repetitiveness of the beats. The naturalness and authenticity of Perry’s voice is always foregrounded (unlike Ke$ha, her voice is almost never processed in a way that draws attention to the artificiality). Her voice thus naturalizes the authoritarian dimension of the rhythm, re-iterating their command as a kind of natural, bodily discipline. It is in this way that Katy Perry’s music is fascist; an aesthetic of fascism it shares with the films of Leni Riefenstahl.

Žižek rejects the idea that “the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc.” in Riefenstahl is fascist in itself, because “such mass performances are not inherently fascist; they are not even ‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers’ movement, their original site of birth.” But Žižek misses the point that there are fascist and non-fascist forms of bodily discipline, and Riefenstahl’s is indeed fascist. We can see the distinction  by comparing Triumph of the Will with Man with a Movie Camera.

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The discipline in Triumph of the Will glorifies the body as organic, making the body part of an ordered whole in which, as in an organism, the parts are given their purposes by their relation to the purposes of the whole: the army marches in a single direction, at the command of a single voice. Fascist discipline instrumentalizes the body. Man with a Movie Camera also involves mass coordinated movement of bodies, but in a rather different context.

Watch video

In this scene, where would-be swimmers coordinate their movements as they learn to swim, discipline isn’t directed towards any larger purpose, indeed, it is an element of play, the opposite of purposiveness. This, indeed, is what’s most startling and liberating about Man with a Movie Camera: it is a hymn to the modern industrial city and worker which rejects productivism throughout. Vertov makes this point most specifically through an image that is repeated, with modification, throughout the film, a spinning wheel which occurs as  cogs, as part of the mechanism of a textile factory, and as a merry-go-round.

With this image, Vertov associates the circular, non-directed character of machinery with the non-teleological nature of play. The productivist associations of factory machinery make this seem odd, but it probably shouldn’t; machinery is, after all, automatic, functioning as it does without any direction of its own. Vertov is here dramatizing what we Derrida calls the commodity’s “automatic autonomy,” and suggesting this as an image of purposelessness which technology under socialist control would make available to humanity. Thus the great difference between socialist organization of the body and fascist organization of the body: to put it schematically, socialism rebuilds the body as part of the machine and thereby frees it for purposeless leisure, while fascism builds the machine into a great body and subordinates us all to that body.

Which brings us to Britney. Rather than setting up a a division between mechanical beats and organic voice, Femme Fatale integrates the two by taking up Britney’s voice and making it part of the machine. As the Rolling Stone review point out, “on nearly every track, Britney’s voice is twisted, shredded, processed, roboticized,” to a fairly remarkable extent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this distortion is the duet between Britney and her autotuned double in the genuinely strange “How I Roll,” or the spoken breakdown in “(Drop Dead) Beautiful” (which I’ve excerpted here as it’s otherwise one of the less interesting tracks on the album), which out-Ke$has Ke$ha. But drawing attention to the distortion draws attention back to the organicism of the undistorted voice;  I think the vocal production works best slightly more subtly in “Inside Out,” one of the best tracks on the album, in which Britney’s voice fades in and out of distortion, and in and out of the backing track, getting lost among both the thudding beats and the bleeping and twinkling synths (which are reminiscent of both Britney’s earlier “Piece of Me” and Sky Ferreira’s “One”).

I think Alex Macpherson said something on Twitter about the way “Hold it Against Me” plays its dubstep bass off against the pop sweetness of its superstructure, and that’s something that occurs throughout the album. At the same time as Britney’s voice is drawn into the artifice of the production, the monotony and remorselessness of the beats is transcended and freed, becoming the artificial autonomy of the machine, producing musically a similar effect to the one Vertov produces cinematically. On Femme Fatale, Britney becomes “a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and … consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market,” and suggests a possible way out through this commodification.

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3. Britney, or, The New Heloïse For my part, I am convinced that it would be as easy to change a blonde into a brunette as a fool into a man of genius. — Rousseau In other Britney news, nice to see the Daily Mail targetting her for a bit of health-as-discipline propaganda....

I like to imagine that Britney’s new video came about when Britney, in a room high up in Spears Towers, complained to her team: “Christina had an elephant in her video! I want an elephant. No, I want two elephants!” And so, they wheeled out the rather tired celebrity/circus analogy, in an attempt to justify the elephants (which, really, ought to be their own justification). The tired conceptual architecture is an example of the general blahness of the album identified by Steven Shaviro;at least Britney kind of gets round to thematizing this timidity in rather gorgeous bonus track “Trouble.” I like Britney’s songs most of all when they involve a carefully constructed simulacrum of psychology (hence why “Lucky” is still my favorite of her records). There’s unfortunately little of that on this album, although “Shattered Glass” is a nice exercise in projection (accompanied by a bass line that sounds a bit like “Living on a Prayer”). The track that’s probably attracting the most attention is “If You Seek Amy.” I have to say I find the “OMG she said fuck” coyness of the track kind of distasteful; I guess that’s the virgin/whore dichotomy for you, but really, Britney’s a 27-year-old woman with two kids, she doesn’t need to pretend she’s still 16. Max Martin apparently thinks it’s the best track he’s ever done, though I really think he’s done better stuff than biting seven-year-old Outkast beats (the video for which, I’d forgotten, also includes an elephant).

The rest of the action’s in the bonus tracks. “Phonography” is pretty good, although unfortunately it doesn’t actually contain the line I’ve used as the title of this post. I guess cryptanalysts aren’t exactly a target audience for Britney. Another line I assume I must have misheard is “I go to seder in my fantasies, like everyday” in “Amnesia.” Although  maybe the Kaballah Centre celebrates Passover?

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I’m impressed that Britney’s recovery from tabloid madness simply involves the universalization of madness to her entire career. I guess it’s not actually surprising, but it’s nice to see it done so well.

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• Not as mad as McCain.
• They plaster on the makeup like trollops, you cunt.
• Probably not stealth muslims.
• Comparitively unlikely to start a war in the Middle East.

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And in her new video, we get even closer to my imagined tactic, with an animated Britney Spears versus riot police.

So, although shaving her head may not have ended up marking her conversion to militant radical feminism, perhaps we can still hold out some hope for Britney the revolutionary.

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These are both Danja tracks, of course, and, great though they are, I wonder if it wasn’t maybe a mistake for Britney to use Danja so heavily on the album. It invites comparison with FutureSex/LoveSounds, which I’m not sure does Britney any favors. Perhaps this is just because Danja, Timbaland’s understudy, isn’t quite up to scratch when Tim is out of the building. But I think there might be a more interesting reason why the Timbaland/Danja style which is so perfect for JT doesn’t quite work for Britney. What’s interesting about the beats on FutureSex/LoveSounds is the way they focus in on a kind of minor point of dance music, it’s sense of grandeur. This might tie in with k-punk’s description of the album as “re-invent[ing] r and b heterosexuality from the male point of view” (it’s surely not unimportant that JT has been wearing some very nice suits in all his recent promotional material). The best example might be “What Goes Around…/…Comes Back Around,” from the absurd punctuation of the title, to the spectacularly expensive video (which conjures up an impossible world of elegant decadence), to the rumbling strings at 6:51 (which my subconscious had extended to the whole of the track).

Danja’s tracks on Blackout attempt to do the same for Britney (check out particularly the last 30 seconds of “Break the Ice”). But I don’t think Britney, for all her talents, really does grandeur. Well, that’s not quite right; Britney does do a certain sort of faded grandeur, as in this great set of slightly Sally-Bowles-esque photos. This has been an almost constant feature of her œuvre. Already on her second album, with “Lucky,” Britney was beginning to pick at her own celebrity status, and it’s a theme she seems unable to get free of, with perhaps its most bizarre manifestation in her reality TV series. “Lucky” is so great because it navigates the pathos of this obsession. The Danja/Timbaland style doesn’t work so well, as for instance on “Gimme More,” which seems to strive for the kind of weightlessness of “My Love” or “Lovestoned,” but is continually dragged back down by Britney’s need to react to her own media image.

So the best tracks on the album are the non-Danja ones, although I don’t really have anything to say about them. “Hot as Ice” is pretty good, and “Ooh Ooh Baby” is fantastic.

Elsewhere on the internet: Jane Dark on Britney’s sadomasochism, and Leila on Britney and Foucault.

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Britney embraces her madness in a slightly different way on “Piece of Me,” (a great song built around a sample midway between the crash of a bag of coins and the smash of breaking glass), in which she refers to herself in passing as “shameless,” which is one of the qualities I prize most highly. As Aristotle points out, shame may be a virtue in children, who don’t know any better, but is always a vice in adults. I imagine this shamelessness will lead to the song being described as “unrepentant,” or, as our local student newspaper rather stupidly says, “Britney needs to accept some culpability.” What’s Britney culpable of and, more importantly, what’s going on with the passive-aggressive “need” in that sentence, positing the reader as somehow in a position to demands a confession from her? This is an instance of the now familiar logic of the celebrity as always-already guilty, who simultaneously confesses to us and on our behalf.

I’m finding this particularly disturbing since having recently read Jodi Dean’s Publicity’s Secret, which argues that celebrity is one of the paradigmatic contemporary forms of subjectivity: we are encouraged to think of everything about us as known, or at least potentially known, by an imagined public. Part of this, as Jodi points out, is a kind of generalized sense of shame, in which we always have to apologize for going shopping in crap clothes, or coming out of a club drunk, or flashing our genitals to photographers. Perhaps this is part of what is going on the recent media penitence of the student tased for asking John Kerry a question.

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Aside from that, I’ve been:

• Worrying about Britney Spears. Everything I saw about the VMA performances was talking about if Britney is fat or not (she isn’t), which misses the more serious point. Britney Spears the supposedly “real person” seems to be having a bit of a tough time, but it’s not like any of us know her, so any sympathy is pretty abstract. More worryingly, the VMA performace was so uninspired in terms of coreography, design, costume; it suggests a serious crises in the Britney Spears machine. Further evidence: she has an album coming out soon, and her website is still totally insane.
• Studying for an exam in contemporary political theory, which has persuaded me of the deep wrongness of political philosophy. Attempting to come up with a philosophical explanation of why certain political disagreements are invalid is not politically useful. See also this post in which Brian Leiter quotes the excellent Raymond Geuss on Rawls, and a number of people miss the point spectacularly in the comments.
• Posting stuff on Twitter. Those of you who read this site via RSS may not have seen the twitter posts in the top right. You can read those via RSS too, if this blog isn’t trivial enough for you.
• Inventing a song about Max Shachtman to the tune of awful Beatles record “Taxman.” My favorite couplet so far involves rhyming “Fourth International schism” with “bureaucratic collectivism.”

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